Don’t Sit Too Long!
We’ve come to a really interesting point in society!
Work has taken on a totally different meaning in recent history! If we look back 1,000 years, work was generally held outside & it always involved some form of physical activity. If you weren’t actually working you were at least doing something & it didn’t involve sitting in front of a screen!
Fast-forward back to present-day, and work, for many, is just sitting at a desk for eight hours! And after a long day’s work – a long drive home, sitting in your car! And after a long drive home, sitting in your car – you sit in front of the T.V. while you eat your dinner!
All that sitting is destroying your health!
The research is mounting! Most studies are in agreement that prolonged sitting is linked to a progressive increase in all-cause mortality!
“... higher amounts of daily total sitting time are associated with greater risk of dying from all-causes. Overall, each hour of daily sitting time was associated with a 2% increase in all-cause mortality risk, after taking the protective effects of physical activity into account. The risk appears to increase significantly when adults sit for more than 7 h/day; by 5% for each 1-hour increment in daily sitting time, when the effects of physical activity are taken into account.”
Spaghetti plot of the raw Hazard Ratios (HR) for all-cause mortality from each study sample, by dose of daily total sitting time, with multivariable adjustment including for physical activity. The bold solid line denotes the pooled HR estimate from the fitted spline model and the dotted lines the 95% confidence limits (Chau et. al; 2013)
We generally look at sitting as a relaxing position, a harmless default position, but the literature suggests that it’s actually one of the most dangerous positions we could put ourselves in! And to that point, prolonged sitting isn’t very relaxing at all – yet, we’re still doing it!
Baker et. al designed a study that had subjects sit for just 2 hours while completing a series of computer or paper-based activities. What they found was that the prolonged sit caused significantly higher whole-body discomfort ratings by participants, a significant increase in problem solving errors, and an overall deterioration of perceived mental state. So not only did the group find acute negative effects on how subjects physically felt, but they also found that prolonged sitting acutely lead to decreased cognitive functioning! With that in mind, it seems strange that in both schooling & the workplace we’ve linked sitting to focus & attention!
So, it goes without saying that in this regard we’re headed in the wrong direction! As much as we’ve progressed as a society, we might benefit from a reversion to past work behaviors!
A study from earlier this month in the European Heart Journal looked at the various movement patterns that occur throughout a 24-hour day & the effect that they have on our cardiometabolic health. Not surprisingly, they found that sitting was the behavior that had the overall worst effect on our health! According to the researchers, if you were to replace 30 minutes of sedentary behavior with moderate to vigorous physical activity each day, you’d see a .63 decrease in BMI (Blodgett et. al; 2023)! Their findings suggests that simply replacing time in sitting with standing, or even sleeping, would have a beneficial effect on your health!
“Sedentary behaviour was the sole behaviour with clear adverse associations with outcomes, regardless of duration.”
There’s a very clear answer to a lot of our modern issues: being more active!
Prolonged sitting is viewed as a risk factor for poor cognitive functions because of aberrant physiological changes in the cardiovascular, pulmonary and metabolic systems. Poor cognitive functions might be associated with prolonged sitting during working hours, and negatively affect work productivity as a vicious cycle.
Note: ++ denotes established evidence from experimental trials;??? represents a hypothetical link; BDNF – Brain derived neurotrophic factor (Chandrasekaran et. al; 2021)
Chandrasekaran et. al postulated that breaking up the modern, sedentary approach to work with intermittent standing or low to moderate physical activity may be beneficial not only for physical health, but also for improving cognitive function! Feels like common sense when we consider the myriad of health benefits that we get from satisfying & purposeful physical activity! The exact science only hits the point home – we’re meant to be in motion!
The take home message is to stand up & stretch your legs!
How about you try some real work for a change!
Works Cited & Further Reading
Chau, J. Y., Grunseit, A. C., Chey, T., Stamatakis, E., Brown, W. J., Matthews, C. E., Bauman, A. E., & van der Ploeg, H. P. (2013). Daily sitting time and all-cause mortality: a meta-analysis. PloS one, 8(11), e80000. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0080000
Baker, R., Coenen, P., Howie, E., Williamson, A., & Straker, L. (2018). The Short Term Musculoskeletal and Cognitive Effects of Prolonged Sitting During Office Computer Work. International journal of environmental research and public health, 15(8), 1678. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph15081678
Blodgett, J. M., Ahmadi, M. N., Atkin, A. J., Chastin, S., Chan, H. W., Suorsa, K., Bakker, E. A., Hettiarcachchi, P., Johansson, P. J., Sherar, L. B., Rangul, V., Pulsford, R. M., Mishra, G., Eijsvogels, T. M. H., Stenholm, S., Hughes, A. D., Teixeira-Pinto, A. M., Ekelund, U., Lee, I. M., Holtermann, A., … ProPASS Collaboration (2023). Device-measured physical activity and cardiometabolic health: the Prospective Physical Activity, Sitting, and Sleep (ProPASS) consortium. European heart journal, ehad717. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1093/eurheartj/ehad717
Chandrasekaran, B., Pesola, A. J., Rao, C. R., & Arumugam, A. (2021). Does breaking up prolonged sitting improve cognitive functions in sedentary adults? A mapping review and hypothesis formulation on the potential physiological mechanisms. BMC musculoskeletal disorders, 22(1), 274. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12891-021-04136-5
